TO get to school, the child leaves home by herself, proudly walking down the boulevard in a suburb of a small city in upstate New York. The crossing guard helps her at the intersection. She lives only a block and a half from school. Yet she walks by older children waiting with parents for buses to the same school.

She is 7, a second-grader, and her mother, Katie, hears the raised-eyebrow remarks: Are you sure you want to be doing this? Katie said friends ask.

Shes just so pretty. Shes just so ... blond. A friend said, I heard that Jaycee Dugard story and I thought of your daughter. And they say, Id never do that with my kid: I wouldnt trust my kid with the street, said Katie, a stay-at-home mother, who asked that her full identity be withheld to protect her children.

Katie, too, is tormented by the abduction monsters embedded in modern parenting. Yet she wants to encourage her daughters independence. Somehow, walking to school has become a political act when its this uncommon, she said. Somebody has to be first.

Traffic. If my kids went to school, it wouldn’t be safe for them to walk to the elementary school just across the road from our subdivision. I nearly got killed trying to walk over there to vote. Now I drive my big van less than 1/2 mile for elections.

4
posted on 09/14/2009 7:45:00 AM PDT
by Tax-chick
("This is our duty: to zot their sorry arses into the next time zone." ~ Admin Mod)

I walked to school every day from First grade on, until I got a car. But times are different. In all those years I was never even approached by a stranger. Now, the consequences are so dire, it’s just not worth it.

She lives only a block and a half from school. Yet she walks by older children waiting with parents for buses to the same school.

From a pure safety perspective, I won't second-guess parents who want their kids to ride a bus.

But I'm calling BS on part of this story. When I was a kid, I had to live 2 miles from the school in order to be allowed on the bus. I couldn't take the bus. My neighbor could, because he lived that much further away (about 100 feet).

Now, I know times are different, and I know cities are different, but in these times of tight budgets, are they really having school buses take kids "a block and a half"????

So terribly sad that our children can’t walk to school, to the store, to a friends house...all the places we went when we were young. I blame the permissive society, and by that I mean permitting perverts to live among us. Many years ago perverts just disappeared after they were found out...and since there is no such thing as a real “life sentence” anymore it would be a good thing if this started happening again. JMHO!

I know a few districts in PA where the kids still walk (because courts have ruled the local districts must pay the cost for transporting private and parochial school students too...so they don’t transport anybody as a way of getting around that) Well, okay...most don’t actually walk, they have Soccer Mom Caravan Traffic Jams at 8:15 in the morning.

I walked about 1/2 mile to school from first to sixth grade unless it was pouring. I also rode my bike where we just stuck them in the rack. Didn’t need locks at all. The bike was always there after school. We never even thought about them getting stolen.

31
posted on 09/14/2009 7:57:49 AM PDT
by AnnGora
(As a result of the Stimulus Bill, Napoleon has no more tots to give.)

When we lived a block and a half from our elementary school, our children who attended there WALKED sometimes alone and sometimes with me. There were some parents who thought I was crazy and/or neglectful. But somehow the children survived. It helped teach our older children a bit of responsibility because they had to make sure the younger ones were okay. And it taught the younger ones that they shouldn’t necessarily rely on their older siblings who may be all about them. hah!

Agreed that it is sad. My own experience was walking or riding a bike with an exception for inclement weather rides from carpool arrangements. K-6 the distance was about 5 blocks, 7-9 distance was about a mile, 10-11 was about 9 blocks (occasional rides w/friends w/cars), senior year about 3 blocks. K-11 town size was around 14k in southern KS, senior year was in a small town of about 2k in northern OK. Never rode a school bus except for special events like band trips, didn’t have my own car until late in my senior year.

Contrast to my children’s experience of never walking to school from our suburban neighborhood because the school was some distance away from the neighborhood and no sidewalks existed that would allow them to walk. There is something that is missed when children don’t walk to school.

34
posted on 09/14/2009 7:59:08 AM PDT
by T-Bird45
(It feels like the seventies, and it shouldn't.)

In the early 80’s ALL children were eligible for busing to our rural Michigan school (K-12), even if they lived across the street. The school was on a busy rural highway. In fact, the school rule was that no one was allowed to cross the street during school time, not even at lunch. Yup, it was excessive, but it kept the school from being sued.

This is a direct result of the Carter Administration supporting a Supreme Court decision that the “homeless” and other degenerates could not be kept out of cities that provided government services for them.

Once again the left's compassion is paid for with the lives of innocent children, and the imposition of additional costs on society. Imagine how much less gasoline would be used each day if we didn't have to crank up millions of big yellow buses.

She lives only a block and a half from school. Yet she walks by older children waiting with parents for buses to the same school.

Okay, so a parent waits with the child at the bus stop rather than just walking with them a block and a half? This really doesn't make any sense and sounds like an exaggeration, a hallmark of a poorly thought-out non-story.

This issue of safety of children in the U.S., has had me puzzled for some time now. Five years ago I moved to Moldova, a small very poor country in Eastern Europe that is about the size of Maryland. It was a part of the Soviet Union.
One of the things that I immediately noticed and thought was so nice is that the children walk to school with no fear of being bothered. When I first came it was kind of a shock to me to see even first graders walking to school alone. I asked some of my Moldovan friends about it and they say there is just not a problem with crimes like that here.
My wife and I were recently in Florida and stayed near an elementary school. She was shocked at the long lines of cars every day taking children to school. I told her it was just not safe otherwise.

If there actually was more crime today, it would mean that humans had genetically changed. Crime statistics come and go, depending about whether people are actually convicted of crimes.

I spent most of my young years walking to school. There were bullies, and I even had a knife brandished on me. There were no doubt sex predators just like there are today. But, do we really need to go to the extreme of not letting kids outside without supervision?

My elementary school had hundreds of bicycles, my kids have zero. And yes, the last bus stop is about 2 blocks away, within a hundred yards of school. Disgusts me, especially when I see that 30-40% of the kids are grossly obese.

Something is really messed up. But hey, at least the schools are actually pretty good, and my kids have very intense education starting at 1st grade.

This issue is about cable news scaring people to death, along with laws too lax for evil people living in our communities.

30 years ago, people had the luxury of saying "how could we have known?" when their child was abducted/raped/murdered.

They don't have that luxury, as hollow as it may actually be, anymore.

30 years ago, most folks lived in areas where they knew most of their neighbors, could easily recognize suspicious interlopers, and probably had faith that their local, state, and Federal government were honestly concerned about their safety.

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